Joseph Loconte's Blog, page 5

National Review: What the Left and the Right Get Wrong about Liberalism

This article was originally posted at National Review.

In the deepening debate over the future of American democracy, the progressive Left and the religious Right have this in common: They both cling to nostalgic fictions about the past. Their revisionist histories, rooted in secularism on the one hand and sectarianism on the other, would propel our politics in the same direction: toward the Leviathan imagined by Thomas Hobbes, an omnicompetent state that offers security and prosperity at the price of freedom.

On the Right, the rejection of liberal democracy is motivated by a yearning for a premodern world: a society animated by medieval concepts of virtue, faith, and authority. Catholic scholars such as Patrick Deneen argue that, under Christendom, the “cultivation of virtue” and “aspiration to the common good” served as bulwarks against tyranny. But liberalism dissolved these ideas, he writes, replacing them with “civic indifference” and “the unfettered and autonomous choice” of the individual. Likewise, Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule condemns the liberal project as the enemy of the historic church. “Both politically and theoretically,” he writes, “hostility to the Church was encoded within liberalism from its birth.”

Behind these views is a cluster of pious — and dangerous — falsehoods about the history of European Christianity. The Catholic medieval project brought with it great reforms in law and education; it abolished slavery and established institutions to care for society’s most vulnerable. Yet, for all its achievements, Christendom failed to uphold the most revolutionary tenets of Christianity — namely, the freedom and equality of every human soul.

Indeed, by insisting that the state enforce an overarching religious identity, the church criminalized dissent, trampled the rights of conscience, and authorized a brutal, continental Inquisition to root out and punish alleged heretics. Alongside its exhortations to virtue was a culture of hedonism and materialism. The humanist scholar Erasmus, satirizing clerical depravity, imagined the apostle Peter denying Pope Julius entry into heaven: “If Satan needed a vicar, he could find none fitter than you.” On the eve of the Protestant Reformation, the crisis of religious authority was manifest: a consequence, in part, of an unholy alliance between pope and emperor.

It required the secular forces of the Enlightenment to sweep aside the superstitions and religious hatreds that stood in the way of a more just and egalitarian society. That, at least, is the narrative of the progressive Left. Under this view, epitomized by thinkers such as Steven Pinker, religious belief is inherently suspect; organized religion is considered the enemy of reason, science, human rights, and social progress. As Pinker declares in Enlightenment Now, “the moral worldview of any scientifically literate person — one who is not blinkered by fundamentalism — requires a clean break from religious conceptions of meaning and value.” As a product of the radical Enlightenment of Spinoza and Voltaire, we are told, the American Founding was essentially a secular affair.

Yet the progressive account of the nation’s origins is rooted in a secularization myth, the false notion that liberal democracy emerged only after religion became privatized and marginalized in public life: the separation of church and state. Progressive historians exhibit a tone-deafness to the religious beliefs that inspired the American revolutionaries and shaped the debates over the U.S. Constitution.

In These Truths: A History of the United States, Jill Lepore offers an informed and vivid account of the American Founding but omits any significant role for the Bible, the most widely read book in colonial America. In her rendering, the Declaration of Independence contained only “secular truths,” with no discernible link to a deity of any variety. Likewise, in First Principles, Thomas Ricks traces the impact of ancient Greece and Rome on the Founders — but has nothing to say about how the Americans bracketed the classical world with a host of Christian assumptions about freedom, equality, and natural rights. In noting the influence of college president John Witherspoon on Madison’s political philosophy, Ricks fails to mention that Witherspoon was an evangelical minister, or that Madison studied theology under Witherspoon before launching his political career.

Contrary to these revisionist histories, the concept of natural rights and freedoms was not a secular idea. Rather, it grew in the soil of revealed religion, when elements of Protestantism supplied the moral and theoretical bedrock for constitutionalism. The key figure, misunderstood by progressives as well as conservatives, was the English philosopher John Locke, considered the father of political liberalism.

Locke’s insight was to combine the classical idea of natural and universal rights with that of natural law, which was always thought to be grounded in the divine will. The law of Nature, Locke wrote in his Two Treatises of Government (1689), taught that every person was born free and independent, “the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker, sent into the world by His order and about his business.” Everyone therefore had “a natural duty” to respect the life, liberty, and possessions of his neighbor. “They are His property, whose workmanship they are made to last during His, not one another’s pleasure.” The rulers of a Hobbesian state, by trampling individual rights and freedoms, robbed God of his divine prerogative and “put themselves into a state of war with the people.” Outside of the Bible, no text was cited more frequently by the American revolutionaries than Locke’s explosive manifesto.

Moreover, Locke’s famous argument for the separation of church and state was not motivated by anticlericalism or a desire to cleanse the public square of religion. A lifelong Anglican, Locke was outraged by the attempt, by both Catholics and Protestants, to impose religious conformity through force. In A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), he appealed to the life and teachings of Jesus, “the Captain of our salvation,” to defend religious liberty for all members of the commonwealth. And because Locke believed firmly in a final judgment — “because no man can so far abandon the care of his own salvation” — everyone must be free to seek religious truth according to the demands of conscience.

Locke placed a heavy burden on church leaders to teach and model a posture of peace and goodwill toward everyone—“as well towards the erroneous as the orthodox; towards those that differ from them in faith and worship, as well as towards those that agree with them therein.” And he delivered a stern warning, as a fellow believer, that God’s judgment awaited those who ignored the plain teaching of Jesus on the matter. “And if anyone that profess himself to be a minister of the word of God, a preacher of the Gospel of peace, teach otherwise; he either understands not, or neglects the business of his calling, and shall one day give account thereof unto the Prince of Peace.”

Locke’s arguments permeated the outlook of colonial America. Protestant ministers, the cultural leaders of the day, embraced Locke’s thinking as a biblical defense of equality, natural rights, and religious freedom. Elisha Williams, a rector at Yale University, in an influential tract published in 1744, warned that whenever government was “applied to any other end than the preservation of their persons and properties, . . . then (according to the great Mr. Lock) it becomes tyranny.” Williams implored religious and political leaders to adopt “that golden precept of our blessed Lord.” As Locke framed it, “the sum of all we drive at is that every man enjoy the same rights that are granted to others.” Here, at the beginning of America’s democratic journey, was the political application of the golden rule.

The religious Right fails to grasp that, in a profoundly important sense, liberalism arose as a Christian response to the failures of Christendom. Although their political agenda remains murky, they seem enamored of the prospect of reestablishing a nationalist, religious vision: a Leviathan wearing the robes of a priest. Under this vision, the exercise of raw executive power would vanquish the enemies of cultural conservatism. Hence their uncritical embrace of Donald Trump, the self-styled defender of Christian values: “Nobody has done more for Christianity . . . or for religion itself than I have,” he recently boasted.

Meanwhile, by disregarding the biblical roots of liberalism, progressives seek to expunge religious ideals from our politics. By severing universal rights from the ballast of religious truth, they debase the concept of rights and transform it into a platform for social entitlements — enforced by the state. By quashing dissent from the new orthodoxy, they summon the spirit of the inquisitor. In their desire for a perfectly egalitarian society, Hobbes would be an ally: “And though of so unlimited a power men may fancy many evil consequences, yet the consequences of the want of it, which is perpetual war of every man against his neighbor, are much worse.”

Here, ironically, is the common ground between the progressive Left and religious Right: the willingness to employ the unlimited power of government to achieve their fantastical aims. But the American experiment in human freedom, for all of its flaws, is a rebuke to the Hobbesian project. The American Revolution in self-government was a Lockean revolution, and its renewal is inconceivable apart from the religious ideals that gave it birth.

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Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

The National Interest: Herbert Hoover in the USSR: The Greatest Humanitarian Campaign in History

This article was originally posted at The National Interest.

A few months before the end of the First World War, when the White Russians were fighting to overturn the incipient communist regime in Moscow, President Woodrow Wilson authorized the deployment of 13,000 American troops to help them. Herbert Hoover, who led U.S. relief efforts in Europe, told Wilson it was a mistake: it would be better to allow Bolshevism to collapse on its own.

“No greater fortune can come to the world,” Hoover wrote the president in March 1919, “than that these foolish ideas should have an opportunity somewhere of bankrupting themselves.”

Hoover was right about the inevitable collapse of the communist experiment in Russia. The moral bankruptcy of Marxism-Leninism would ravage the lives of countless millions of people over the next seventy years. But Hoover could not have anticipated the immediate horrific consequences of its ideology.

A drought, aggravated by Vladimir Lenin’s “collective system of agriculture”—by which the state seized the property and the produce of Russian peasants—left the Soviet economy in ruins. By the summer of 1921, at least 35 million people were at risk of starvation. In desperation, Moscow instructed Maxim Gorky, the famous novelist, to issue an appeal to the West for aid. Hoover responded in a July 23 telegram that set into motion the largest and most successful humanitarian relief effort in history.

Under Hoover’s leadership, the American Relief Administration (ARA), a private organization, set up 19,000 relief stations in the Soviet Union, from Ukraine to Siberia, delivering food, clothing, and medicine. Employing barely three hundred Americans alongside 120,000 Russians, the ARA fed 10.5 million people per day. It is estimated that the American effort rescued at least ten million people from death by starvation and disease. Historian Anatoly Utkin, grandson of one of the survivors, told an interviewer for The American Experience, that “there was not a spark of hope anywhere. Unexpectedly, without any reason, nobody could explain why Americans came, why they provided food for children.”

It is hard to think of another individual who could have orchestrated such a massive operation of human and physical resources. Before entering politics, Hoover had been a successful mining engineer with business interests all over the world. But he was hungry for a larger cause. It arrived in 1914, during the First World War. When Germany invaded neutral Belgium, the civilian population was caught between a hostile army and a British naval blockade. Seven million Belgians faced starvation.

Hoover convinced the belligerent nations to allow his newly created Commission for Relief in Belgium to purchase and deliver food to the destitute Belgians. All of the organization’s initial volunteers were Americans. Throughout the war and beyond, Hoover’s volunteers delivered assistance to 9 million civilians in Belgium and German-occupied France. As historian George Nash describes it, Hoover created “an elaborate, voluntary enterprise without precedent in human history: an organized rescue of an entire nation from starvation.” Hoover became an international hero, “the embodiment of a new force in global politics: American benevolence.”

The American relief effort in the Soviet Union was, indeed, an astonishing act of benevolence. No other nation on earth possessed the democratic idealism, the economic resources, and the national will to carry out an effort on such a massive scale.

Yet it was also a political act: an attempt to persuade Russians to abandon communism and embrace the democratic capitalism of the West. As Bertrand Patenaude explains in The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921, Hoover hoped that the example of American efficiency and entrepreneurship would further discredit the “murderous tyranny” in Moscow. “Hoover believed that if he could only relieve the Russians’ hunger,” Patenaude writes, “they would return to their senses and recover the physical strength to throw off their Bolshevik oppressors.”

However unlikely that hope might have been, the Politburo and its apparatchiks must have worried. The communists attempted to control and discredit the U.S. program whenever they felt threatened. “As for the hooverites,” Lenin warned, “we must shadow them with all our might.” But Hoover kept the operation apolitical. He instructed his team that any American who involved himself in politics in Russia would immediately be removed from the mission.

Determined to shift responsibility for the crisis to outside forces, the communist leadership in Moscow portrayed themselves as stewards of the national interest ready to marshall every resource possible to rescue a grateful population from ruin. Liberal elites in the West swallowed the propaganda wholesale. In a report dated October 15, 1921, for example, The New York Times praised Lenin’s “scheme of decentralization” for “developing a national Russian feeling, as opposed to a merely communist viewpoint.” The Kremlin, explained the Times, had “worked feverishly” to get food to starving people. “Imbued with the idea that the Government was straining every nerve to help the nation, all classes and factions have given their unreserved co-operation.”

In fact, the Bolsheviks used food as a weapon—diverting assistance from children to their political allies—and never fully confronted the enormity of the catastrophe facing the Soviet people. “People had been reduced to eating weeds mixed up with ground bones, tree bark, and clay, as well as horses, dogs, cats, rats and the straw from roofs,” writes historian Cynthia Haven. “The government made efforts to stop the selling of human flesh and posted guards in cemeteries to prevent raiding.”

Hoover’s reputation as both a tough anti-communist and effective humanitarian helped him to win popular support for the U.S. effort. In 1921, Congress appropriated $20 million for assistance under the Russian Famine Relief Act, an unprecedented commitment of public money for a political foe. Millions more came from private donations, many from America’s children, who wrote letters to their Russian counterparts. As Hoover noted, the United States delivered about 700,000 tons of corn, wheat seed, clothing, and medicine “as an absolute gift.”

Here is the humanitarian tradition that the world instantly associates with the United States: a tradition rooted in its Judeo-Christian culture and in the belief that America has a unique role in defending human rights and democratic freedom around the globe. Here, in fact, is American exceptionalism without apology—a concept loathsome to the progressive left, but nonetheless, the motivating force behind a national act of compassion unmatched in the history of human civilization.

In July 1923, upon the completion of the humanitarian mission, the Commissars in the Kremlin hosted a dinner for Hoover’s staff. “The Union of the Socialist Soviet Republics,” they said, “never will forget the aid rendered to them by the American People.” In the same year, the communist party’s chief ideologist, Nikolai Bukharin, declared: “We need Marxism plus Americanism.” In truth, the Soviets could never combine the two, and they soon expunged the story of American generosity from their history books.

Hoover, who went on to become president in 1929, is typically criticized for his handling of the economic crisis that produced the Great Depression. Nevertheless, through five decades of public service, no statesman did more in the first half of the twentieth century to strengthen America’s identity as an indispensable defender of human dignity. In 1948, reflecting on his travels, Hoover summarized what he believed the United States meant to people around the world:

I have seen America in contrast with many nations and races. My profession took me into many foreign lands under many kinds of government. I have worked with their great spiritual leaders and their great statesmen. I have worked in governments of free men, of tyrannies, of Socialists and of Communists. I have met with princes, kings, despots, and desperadoes … I was associated in their working lives and problems. I had to deal with their governments. And outstanding everywhere to these great masses of people there was a hallowed word—America. To them, it was the hope of the world.

A century ago, America’s intervention on behalf of a political enemy did not only lay bare the abysmal failure of communism as a political ideology. It also revealed the extraordinary generosity, ingenuity, and dynamism of a nation composed of free men and women. America: the hope of the world.

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Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

The National Interest: To Many Refugees, America Is Still the Land of Hope

This article was originally posted at The National Interest.

The human catastrophe engulfing Afghanistan following the withdrawal of U.S. troops has made a mockery of America’s image as a safe harbor for the persecuted peoples of the world. Cynicism about the United States and its role on the world stage is the mood of the hour. But a remedy for cynicism is the discipline of memory: My trip to this tiny, ragged island in the Tyrrhenian Sea has reminded me of why so many people still look to America when their futures seem bleak.

A century ago, in 1921, Giuseppe Aiello left his home in Ventotene, boarded the S.S. Patria and sailed from Naples to New York City. The boat manifest listed his occupation as “barber.” He was 16 years old. Though he had little education and spoke virtually no English, he found work and learned his trade. Eventually, he owned his own barbershop in midtown Manhattan, just a few blocks from Pennsylvania Station.

The barber was my grandfather, one of ten children belonging to Vincenzo and Marianna Aiello. Though some of his siblings would follow him to the United States, he never saw his parents again. Given the profound importance of la famiglia among Italians, my grandfather made one of the most painful decisions imaginable. Many other Italians did likewise: From 1920 to 1924, roughly 250,000 of them left everything to come to the United States. Why?

Just as in Afghanistan today, the ravages of war had much to do with it. The industrialized carnage of the First World War left the European economies bankrupt. Even though Italy was on the winning side of the conflict, its society was in tatters. About 578,000 soldiers were dead. Returning soldiers faced a staggering degree of poverty, with few job prospects. On top of it all, the Influenza virus killed nearly as many Italians as did the Great War.

By 1921, Italy was on the edge of a massive breakdown in law and order. The parliament was corrupt, the monarchy unloved. There were fears of a communist takeover. Writes historian R. J. B. Bosworth: “For Italy, least of the great powers, poorest of the great economies, most fragile of the great societies … the conversion from war to peace entailed a sea of troubles.” The country was ripe for an ideology that promised to restore the glory that was Rome.

Enter Benito Mussolini. An ex-communist, Mussolini founded his fascist party in 1919. Within two years, he and his “Black-shirts” swept into power, declaring the end of Italy’s experiment in liberal democracy. “For the Fascist, everything is in the State,” he proclaimed, “and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State.” It is a maxim that could come from the lips of the Taliban: fascism under the banner of the Islamic state.

Mussolini mocked what he called “the putrid corpse of liberty” and intended to preside over its funeral. In 1926, his fascist government wiped away the remnants of democracy and civil rights: Opposition political parties and trade unions were banned; freedom of the press was quashed, and there were restrictions on travel abroad.

Next began a policy of “mandatory residency,” in which thousands of political opponents were rounded up and relocated to remote islands. Chief among them was the island of Ventotene.

In ancient Rome, Ventotene was a prison island, where the Caesars sent their adulterous wives and daughters. Criminals, radicals, persecuted Christians—all carved out a desperate existence on Ventotene. Mussolini revived its reputation. At least 2,000 Italians were imprisoned here under his regime, and there are signs scattered around the island to mark the locations of detainment. Gift stores even sell T-shirts emblazoned with the words, isola di confino, island of confinement.

In 1945, the Italians would finally come to despise “Il Duce”—but only after he nearly destroyed the country through his wartime alliance with Hitler’s Germany. Mussolini was executed before a cheering crowd. According to an eyewitness, it was “as if the whole thing was a dream from which we would awake to find the world unchanged.”

The Italians who were fortunate enough to escape Italy during the fever of fascism nurtured another dream. To be sure, the United States was not always a welcoming place. The U.S. Immigration Act of 1924, for example, drastically cut immigration from Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe. Thanks to bigotry and xenophobia, one of the major aims of the legislation was keeping out the Italians.

Yet even at its ugliest, the United States looked like a haven of sanity in a world gone mad. It must have looked that way to my grandfather. It surely looks that way today, to the thousands of Afghans desperate to be rescued from the Taliban.

If we open our doors, they will enrich our national life. For it is a familiar story. Like countless other immigrants whose life prospects compelled them to leave home, my grandfather grew to love his adopted country. He bought a house in Brooklyn, married, had four children, thirteen grandchildren, and twenty-three great-grandchildren.

A century ago, he made a choice for all of us: America.

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Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

National Review: The Freedom Letter to the Romans

This article was originally posted at National Review.

This essay series explores Italy’s unique contribution to the rich inheritance of Western civilization, offering a defense of the West’s political and cultural achievements. Find previous installments here, here, here, and here.

Rome, Italy — Outside the Basilica San Paolo Fuori le Mura, commonly known as the Basilica of Saint Paul, stands an imposing marble statue of a man who appears ready to do battle with the world. Bearded and hooded, he clutches a Bible in his left hand and a long cross in his right — but holds the cross over his chest as if it were a sword. It is a fitting representation of the man whose writings arguably have done more to rout the forces of bigotry and tyranny than those of any other figure in history.

Saul of Tarsus, an observant Jew who was renamed Paul after his dramatic conversion to Christianity, claimed a divine calling to bring the message of Jesus to those outside the Jewish faith, that is, to the Gentiles. His mission ended here when, according to tradition, he was executed by the authorities of Rome. Hence, the historical irony: Paul’s letter to the believers in Rome, the theological loadstar of the Christian church, helped to topple the regime that could not tolerate his uncompromising message of redemption.

A relentless evangelist with almost reckless courage, Paul is the dominant figure in the early decades of the Christian movement. Of the 27 documents that compose the New Testament, 21 are letters; 13 of them are attributed to Paul. His Letter to the Romans stands apart. Written around 57 a.d., near the end of his career, it contains the most thorough exposition of Christian doctrine in the Bible. It also advances concepts considered utterly radical for their time — ideas that would shape the course of Western civilization and the American political order.

In his Social Contract (1762), Jean Jacques Rousseau claimed that “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Paul disagreed. To the apostle, every person was born into a state of spiritual slavery and death. Everyone stood guilty before a holy God, no matter what their achievements or circumstances: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). His second proposition remains as controversial today as when it first appeared: Jesus was sent by God to set people free, making salvation available to everyone through faith in his death and resurrection. “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9). The last proposition, which follows from the others, involves an astonishing universalism. “There is no difference between Jew and Gentile — the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him” (Romans 10:12). The sacrifice of Jesus renders null and void the deep, cultural divisions within the human family; all are welcomed into God’s new spiritual community.

In a way no ancient text had contemplated, the Letter to the Romans introduced two great themes into the bloodstream of the West: human equality and human freedom. No ideas in the history of political thought would prove more transformative and ennobling.

Some of history’s most influential figures have considered Paul’s letter their north star. Scholars often draw attention to the role of the letter in the conversion of Augustine of Hippo. This saint’s Confessions (circa 400 a.d.) grew out of his meditations on Romans, Chapter 7, with its description of how faith in Christ empowers the individual to prevail in the struggle against sin. Yet Augustine’s epic defense of the faith, The City of God (426 a.d.), also owes an immense debt to the central themes of Romans. “In the city of the world both the rulers themselves and the people they dominate are dominated by the lust for domination,” he wrote, “whereas in the City of God all citizens serve one another in charity.”

More than a thousand years later, when Christendom was racked by a series of internal crises, an Augustinian monk turned to the Letter to the Romans in his own desperate quest to find peace with God. Martin Luther, a professor of the Bible at Wittenberg University, was initially terrified by the concept of the “righteousness of God” as described in Romans, Chapter 1. His insight — what he regarded as a recovery of the gospel of grace — completely upended his life:

I had greatly longed to understand Paul’s letter to the Romans. . . . I grasped the truth that the righteousness of God is that righteousness whereby, through grace and sheer mercy, he justifies us by faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise.

Unlike any work of literature or philosophy, it was Paul’s epistle that compelled Luther to launch what became the Protestant Reformation. He called the letter “the soul’s daily bread,” “the gospel in its purest expression,” and “a brilliant light, almost enough to illumine the whole Bible.” In his seminal treatise, The Freedom of a Christian (1520), Luther contrasted the liberty of the gospel, properly understood, with “the crawling maggots of man-made laws and regulations” imposed upon believers by church authorities. Luther’s teachings about spiritual freedom — what might be called a spiritual bill of rights — became a rallying cry throughout Europe.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the themes of freedom and equality in the Letter to the Romans can be discerned in the beloved hymn, “Amazing Grace,” written by a former slave-ship captain, John Newton; in the social reform efforts of John and Charles Wesley; in the campaign to abolish the slave trade in Great Britain; and in the sermons that shaped the Protestant and democratic culture of colonial America. In the years leading up to the American Revolution, Jonathan Mayhew preached a widely disseminated sermon justifying rebellion against tyranny. His text was Romans, Chapter 13 — Paul’s instruction to believers to submit to political authorities:

Thus, upon a careful review of the apostle’s reasoning in this passage, it appears that his arguments to enforce submission, are of such a nature, as to conclude only in favor of submission to such rulers as he himself describes, i.e., such as rule for the good of society, which is the only end of their institution. Common tyrants, and public oppressors, are not entitled to obedience from their subjects, by virtue of anything here laid down by the inspired apostle.

John Adams, reflecting on the origins of the Revolution years later, cited Mayhew’s sermon as a factor in persuading pious believers of the legitimacy of political resistance. Mayhew may also have persuaded the more secular-minded Ben Franklin, whose proposed motto for the American seal was “rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”

The Letter to the Romans gained renewed prominence in the 20th century after the carnage of the First World War. In his Epistle to the Romans (1918), Swiss theologian Karl Barth shook off his attachment to theological liberalism and its illusions of human progress by meditating on the letter’s key doctrines. “The mighty voice of Paul was new to me,” he wrote, “and if to me, no doubt to many others also.” According to Catholic theologian Karl Adam, Barth’s recovery of the concept of man’s alienation from God and his need of divine grace dropped “like a bombshell on the theologians’ playground.” It is surely no coincidence that Barth was one of the first European theologians to recognize the apostasy of Nazism. He also was the lead author of the Barmen Declaration (1934), the first major ecclesiastical challenge to the racist ideology of the Nazi state.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. saw many parallels in his own life and that of the Apostle Paul. He used Paul’s Letter to the Romans like a battering ram in his campaign for civil rights. In a 1956 sermon in Montgomery, Ala., plainly modeled on Paul’s epistle, King warned American Christians, in the words of Paul, not to conform “to the pattern of this world,” but rather to recommit themselves to the binding moral and spiritual truths of the gospel:

Don’t worry about persecution America; you are going to have that if you stand up for a great principle. I can say this with some authority, because my life was a continual round of persecutions. . . . I came away from each of these experiences more persuaded than ever before that ‘neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come . . . shall separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ I still believe that standing up for the truth of God is the greatest thing in the world.

King’s citation, from Romans, Chapter 8 — about the relentless love of God in the face of great evil — was a spiritual anchor in his long struggle for justice. Like Paul, his sense of vocation led to persecution, imprisonment, and, ultimately, a violent death.

Historians debate Paul’s precise motives for writing his treatise to the Christians in Rome. By virtue of its location in the seat of the Roman Empire, the church at Rome was a thoroughly cosmopolitan congregation: a mix of Jews and Gentiles, rich and poor, citizens and slaves. Paul told the believers that he planned to visit them on his way to Spain. Instead, the apostle found himself under arrest and taken to Rome to await trial. He made good use of his confinement: He wrote four letters to other Christian churches that became part of the New Testament canon. As a Roman citizen, Paul was allowed a measure of freedom, and for two years he “welcomed all who came to him, proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance” (Acts 28:30-31).

Eventually, not even Rome’s emperors could resist the gospel message to which Paul devoted his life. As historian Ernle Bradford described it in Paul the Traveler, the apostle never hesitated to hurl himself into the center of the storm: “Rome was always what he sought, the heart of power, the heart of darkness, where he could set fire to the aspirations of millions.” Nearly 2,000 years after Paul’s martyrdom, the hope of freedom and redemption burns steadily in nearly every corner of the world.

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Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

National Review: A New Order for the Ages

This article was originally posted at National Review.

This essay series explores Italy’s unique contribution to the rich inheritance of Western civilization, offering a defense of the West’s political and cultural achievements. Find previous installments here, here, and here.

Naples, Italy — At a crisis moment in his life, the epic hero of Virgil’s mythic account of the founding of Rome turns to a woman for counsel. Aeneas, the prince of Troy, had fled the ruins of his city when it fell to the Greeks and arrived in Cumae, west of Naples, anxious and uncertain about his fate. He asks the Sibyl of Cumae, one of the most revered prophets of the ancient world, to guide him in his journey to the underworld. She agrees, but not before delivering a message filled with foreboding:

You have braved the terrors of the sea, though worse remain on land — you Trojans will reach Lavinium’s realm — lift that care from your hearts — but you will rue your arrival. Wars, horrendous wars, and the Tiber foaming with tides of blood, I see it all!

The Aeneid has been described by one scholar as “the single most influential literary work of European civilization for the better part of two millennia.” It is a story about origins, written by Rome’s greatest poet when his nation was in the throes of an identity crisis. The Roman people had discarded their republican form of government in favor of an empire run by autocrats. Virgil, probably prompted by the Emperor Augustus, sought to give Rome a revived sense of its civilizing mission in the world — to somehow reconcile the ideals of the republic with the fearsome realities of the empire.

The encounter at Cumae marks a turning point for Aeneas. “Come, press on with your journey,” says the Sibyl. “See it through, this duty you’ve undertaken.” Aeneas, obedient to the calling on his life, forges ahead.

America’s founding generation absorbed Virgil (70–19 b.c.) and the lessons of Rome. They admired the story of Aeneas, the man who led a tiny group of intrepid refugees across the sea to create a great nation in a hostile world. Like Rome, the American republic would inaugurate a new social and political order. Indeed, the motto on the Great Seal of the United States, a novus ordo seclorum — a new order for the ages — was borrowed fromVirgil’s book of poems, The Eclogues. Unlike Rome, however, this political order would be based on the concepts of human equality and human freedom.

It thus comes as no surprise that the progressive assault on America as a racist and imperialist juggernaut has drawn into its wake a raft of revisionist views of Virgil’s work. Awash in woke assumptions about the West, critics don’t have much to say about some of the key elements of the story, such as virtue, sacrifice, and faith. “Two thousand years after its appearance,” writes Daniel Mendelsohn in The New Yorker, “we still can’t decide if his masterpiece is a regressive celebration of power as a means of political domination or a craftily coded critique of imperial ideology.”

It does not occur to the leftist literati that there are other, legitimate ways of appreciating Virgil’s achievement that avoid these crude tropes. The English classicist Bernard Knox, for example, identified three major virtues on display in the work. All of them, it turns out, are essential for republican government.

There is the concept of auctoritas, the respect that is earned by those who lead and govern wisely and bravely, whether in war or peacetime. It suggests an intangible yet widely acknowledged moral authority. There is the idea of gravitas, a deep seriousness about political and religious matters. It requires maturity, a grasp of the ultimate issues at stake in the contest at hand.

Lastly, there is pietas, which signifies duty and devotion: honoring one’s binding commitments regardless of the personal costs. In the early lines of the poem, Aeneas is called “a man outstanding in his piety.” This quality was immensely significant to C. S. Lewis, the Christian author and scholar of English literature at Oxford University. Lewis regarded the Aeneid, with its emphasis on pietas, as one of the most important influences on his professional life. “It is the nature of a vocation to appear to men in the double character of a duty and a desire, and Virgil does justice to both,” he wrote. “To follow the vocation does not mean happiness: but once it has been heard, there is no happiness for those who do not follow.”

When the American founders wrote that “civic virtue” was essential for republicanism, they had the Roman concept of pietas especially in mind. As Knox explains, the Latin word carries a broad meaning. It includes the idea of piety, of course, or devotion to the Divine. Aeneas “is always mindful of the gods, constant in prayer and thanks and dutiful in sacrifice.” It also involves devotion to family, an outstanding trait in the life of Aeneas. George Washington kept on his mantelpiece a bronze sculpture of Aeneas carrying his father as they escaped from the fires of Troy.

Yet pietas contains another obligation in addition to what is owed the gods and family, a quality that has come under sustained assault in the progressive age of rage: duty to one’s country. For Aeneas, his loyalty is to Rome. His task is not only to wage war and defeat defiant tribes, his supreme mission is nothing less than to establish a new civilization: “Roman, remember by your strength to rule Earth’s peoples — for your arts are to be these: to pacify, to impose the rule of law, to spare the conquered, battle down the proud.”

Aeneas accepts his calling reluctantly, sensing the hazards that lie ahead. When he wavers — as when he falls in love with Dido of Carthage and convinces himself that Carthage, not Rome, can be the new home for the Trojans — he invites disaster. It is only when Aeneas submits unreservedly to the divine calling that he achieves his stature as a great leader. In this, he becomes a model of civic virtue: the individual who chooses the public good over private ambition, who sacrifices himself for the sake of the Roman republic, the res publica.

Virgil helped to make the concept of pietas an ideal for all Romans. His tomb, a place of pilgrimage for centuries, is in Naples, where he owned a villa. It forms the center of a park dedicated to his memory.

When the American founders considered the virtues necessary for self-government, they turned instinctively to Rome. Most of them were trained in the classics. They devoured the works of Cicero, Tacitus, Livy, and Plutarch. They reflected deeply on the inevitable clash between freedom and order, between individual liberty and the will to power. The result was a written constitution that has made possible the most democratic, prosperous, and welcoming society in history.

Today, however, the United States, lacerated by divisions and self-doubt, seems to sit on the edge of a knife. After years of civil war, the Romans looked to Virgil to recover the virtues that helped to establish and sustain their republic. In the end, their political project collapsed into tyranny. Now in the throes of a culture war over the moral legitimacy of our political order, Americans are uncertain where to turn for guidance or inspiration. Rather than pietas, impiety is all the rage.

Words from the Sibyl come to mind: “Man of Troy, the descent to the Underworld is easy. Night and day the gates of shadowy Death stand open wide, but to retrace your steps, to climb back to the upper air — there the struggle, there the labor lies.”

Editor’s note: This article originally stated that the phrase “new order for the ages” came from the Aeneid; it came from Virgil’s Ecologues.

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Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

National Review: Cicero: A Republic — If You Can Keep It

This article was originally posted at National Review.

This essay series explores Italy’s unique contribution to the rich inheritance of Western civilization, offering a defense of the West’s political and cultural achievements. Find previous installments here and here.

Formia, Italy — When the American struggle for independence was beginning to look like a fool’s errand, John Adams left for Paris to help Ben Franklin secure a military alliance with the French. His ten-year-old son, the future president John Quincy, was with him when they sailed from Massachusetts in February 1778.

During the journey, Adams helped his son translate a famous address by Cicero in which he accused a Roman senator, Lucius Sergius Catilina, of planning to overthrow Rome’s republican government:

That destruction which you have been long plotting against us ought to have already fallen on your own head. . . .You will go at last where your unbridled and mad desire has been long hurrying you.

More than any other authority from the classical world, the American Founders looked to Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 b.c.), Rome’s greatest statesman, as they sought to design a democratic republic that would not collapse into despotism.

Cicero’s career was a cautionary tale. His decades-long struggle to preserve Rome’s republic — with its “mixed” constitution — ended here, in his seaside villa north of Naples. In 43 b.c., assassins sent by Marc Anthony, his political rival, approached him with swords drawn. “There is nothing proper about what you are doing, soldier,” he reportedly told them, “but try to kill me properly.” They cut off his head.

“Cicero came to stand for future generations as a model of defiance against tyranny,” writes Anthony Everitt in Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician. More importantly, the writings of Tully (as his name was Anglicized) were required reading for all educated people in 18th-century Britain and the United States. As a result, writes Everitt, “he became an unknowing architect of constitutions that still govern our lives.”

Cicero’s most important contribution to modern political thought was the concept of mixed government, an idea he got from the Greeks. Plato identified three basic forms of government: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. In his Politics, Aristotle argued that a combination of the three, in which their powers were balanced, was the best form of government.

Cicero seized upon the concept and made it the centerpiece of The Republic (54–51 b.c.), written just before the outbreak of civil war. No one form of rule should be allowed to dominate the political system, he said, because “each of these governments follows a kind of steep and slippery path which leads to a depraved version of itself.” Rome’s leadership ignored Cicero’s warning, putting an end to him — and to the republic that he idolized.

The Founders knew this history well. They wanted a constitution that could weather the storms of faction, jealousy, and lust for power. As James Madison put the matter in The Federalist Papers (1787–88), the Americans sought “a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.”

And they seized upon Cicero. In his influential Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States (1787), which circulated at the Constitutional Convention, Adams traced the development of the balanced constitution from Aristotle to Cicero, his hero. “As all the ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher united in the same character,” Adams wrote, “his authority should have great weight.”

The Founders also turned to thinkers such as the French philosopher Montesquieu (1689-1755), author of The Spirit of Laws, one of the great works in the history of political thought. Montesquieu famously developed a theory of the separation of powers: legislative, executive, and judicial. “When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates,” he wrote, “there can be no liberty.” Yet, in this, Montesquieu acknowledged his own intellectual debt to Cicero and Rome’s example.

In addition to his politics, Cicero was beloved among the Founders because of his eloquence. Lawyer, senator, consul, philosopher — in each of these roles Cicero honed his reputation as one of Rome’s greatest orators. Fifty-two of his speeches, including his Catiline Orations, delivered to the Roman senate in 63 b.c., have survived. In works such as De Oratore (55 b.c.), Cicero argued that the effective speaker must combine logic and wisdom with the heart of a poet and the instincts of an actor. “Nothing, therefore, is more rarely found among mankind,” he complained, “than a consummate orator.”

The American Revolution produced more than a few. By 1776, there were nine colleges in the colonies, all with essentially the same entry requirements, namely, the ability to read Cicero and Virgil in Latin and the New Testament in Greek. When he applied to King’s College (now Columbia), John Jay had to translate three orations from Cicero. John Adams, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton faced similar requirements for their entrance exams to Harvard, the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), and King’s College, respectively. As president of the College of New Jersey (1765–1792), the Reverend John Witherspoon transformed the school into an academic training ground for statesmen, elevating rhetoric along Ciceronian lines. (Witherspoon named his home Tusculum, after Cicero’s Italian villa.)

Cicero wrote with great insight about the concepts of justice, education, morals, and the character of the ideal statesman. But perhaps his most important contribution to the American political order was his understanding of natural law.

Cicero believed that a rational Providence oversaw the world, a world embedded in divine law: a set of moral and religious truths that govern the human condition. These truths were etched into the mind and conscience of every human being. “The nature of law must be sought in the nature of man,” he wrote in The Laws. “Man is a single species which has a share in divine reason and is bound together by a partnership in justice.”

As Cicero explained it, a political commitment to justice was only possible because of the universal and unchangeable character of natural law. It alone provided “the bond which holds together a community of citizens.” His description of natural law would be embraced by thinkers ranging from Thomas Aquinas to John Locke to Thomas Jefferson:

We cannot be exempted from this law by any decree of the Senate or the people; nor do we need anyone else to expound or explain it. There will not be one such law in Rome and another in Athens, one now and another in the future, but all peoples at all times will be embraced by a single and eternal and unchangeable law; and there will be, as it were, one lord and master of us all—the god who is the author, proposer and interpreter of that law. Whoever refuses to obey it will be turning his back on himself. Because he has denied his nature as a human being he will face the gravest penalties for this alone.

All of the Founders subscribed to some version of natural law; it seemed to confirm the teachings of Christianity, held in high regard in the Protestant culture of colonial America. Thus, most of the Founders had Cicero in mind when they made natural law part of their political discourse. “Although the Founders had access to every level of Western discourse on natural law,” writes historian Carl J. Richard, “they cited Cicero in support of the theory even more than in support of mixed government.”

The great innovation of the advocates of republicanism in the 17th and 18th centuries was to base their arguments for “unalienable” natural rights on a universal natural law. Neither Cicero nor any of the other classical philosophers made this conceptual jump.

In the history of political theory, the most developed and persuasive account of natural rights appears in Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689), the document that helped to ignite the American Revolution. It is no accident that Locke absorbed the writings of Cicero and deployed his natural-law concepts for his own revolutionary purposes. Indeed, in explaining the potency of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson confessed thus: “All its authority rests, then, on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, in printed essays, or the elementary books of public right, [such] as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc.”

With the ideals of Western Civilization under intense assault, how should we evaluate Cicero’s legacy? The remains of an ancient villa in Formia are said to contain his tomb, an easily overlooked tourist destination. His statue sits majestically in front of the Palace of Justice in Rome, home of Italy’s Supreme Court. That seems fitting. In his political theory and his public career, Cicero embodied an outlook that is essential for a healthy democratic society: an authentic passion for justice. “Nothing can be sweeter than liberty,” he wrote. “Yet if it isn’t equal throughout, it isn’t liberty at all.”

For all his faults and personal ego, Cicero also possessed a quality desperately lacking in our degraded political culture: the willingness to surrender power for the sake of the republic.

In his speech before the Roman Senate, Cicero exposed Catiline’s plot to ignite an insurrection across Italy and seize power. Before he finished speaking, Catiline fled the Senate; he and other leading conspirators were either killed in battle or executed. As consul, Cicero was granted emergency powers. Instead, he walked away from absolute rule and restored the republic. Cicero was awarded the honorary title of Pater Patriae, Father of the Country, the same title given to George Washington, who willingly resigned his military commission and repeatedly declined to serve as king.

“The people that is ruled by a king lacks a great deal,” wrote Cicero, “and above all it lacks liberty, which does not consist in having a just master, but in having none.” Can Americans recover Cicero’s insights into human nature and the nature of political power? Upon the answer to that question hangs the future of this republic.

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Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

National Review: Bologna: Birthplace of the University

This article was originally posted at National Review.

This essay series explores Italy’s unique contribution to the rich inheritance of Western civilization, offering a defense of the West’s political and cultural achievements.

Bologna, Italy — The idea of the university, of an institution devoted to freedom of thought in the pursuit of truth, stretches back nearly a millennium. Its origins can be traced here, when a daring and powerful woman invited a famous scholar to teach Roman law to a small group of ambitious young men.

The Countess Matilda, heiress to vast tracts of land in Tuscany and a friend of Pope Gregory VII, was as fervent in her quest for knowledge as in her piety. In 1080, the discovery in an Italian library of texts of Roman law, compiled under Justinian in the sixth century but lost for many years, created a sensation. As historian Harold Berman explains, Europeans viewed Justinian’s law as “the ideal law, the embodiment of reason,” and applicable everywhere. The texts were copied and began to be studied, as students gathered to hire teachers to expound their meaning. A popular and dynamic teacher known as Irnerius caught the attention of Matilda, and in 1088 she arranged to have him teach in her native Bologna.

It marked a quiet yet profound revolution in the history of education. The Bologna students quickly organized themselves into a guild, what they called a universitas, a term from Roman law to describe an association with a legal personality. It was a bottom-up affair: The students paid the salaries of the professors themselves — and penalized them if they were not fulfilling their academic duties. They secured a charter from the city of Bologna that made them responsible for:

The cultivation of fraternal charity, mutual association and amity, the care of the sick and needy, the conduct of funerals and the extirpation of rancor and quarrels, the attendance and escort of our candidates for the doctorate to and from the place of examination, and the spiritual welfare of members.

The school at Bologna eventually drew teachers and students from all over Europe and from other disciplines — medicine, theology, philosophy, the liberal arts — and organized them into an academic profession. This spontaneous experiment marked the birth of the university, the oldest in the world, and the first institution to establish academic requirements and award degrees. The principle of academic freedom had taken root.

Bologna introduced a completely novel approach to education in the West. Before the eleventh century, formal education in Europe occurred almost exclusively in monasteries. In the emerging cathedral schools, education was supervised by ecclesiastical authorities, charged with upholding the doctrinal teachings of the Catholic Church. The desire to ensure orthodoxy intensified as tensions mounted between church and state. They hit a high-water mark during the Papal Revolution, a campaign begun in the eleventh century to preserve the independence and authority of the Church of Rome against the claims of emperors and kings. Thus, there were hard limits on what could be taught or debated, even at Bologna, which was not under church supervision.

Nevertheless, there was a spirit of innovation and freedom at Bologna, where the city and the university collaborated to preserve their independence and advance a common educational vision. The city of Bologna, under the slogan libertas, had sought to escape feudal rule and become a free commune. For the first century of its existence, the university was free to establish its own academic priorities and operated independently of the church. Bolognese jurists could support opposing views about the extent to which Roman law supported papal or imperial claims. Students were encouraged to do the same in a curriculum that included the disputatio, a debate supervised by a professor, a precursor to the modern moot court.

Bologna’s revival of Roman law also set the stage for the compilation and study of canon law, the papal rulings, and other decrees issued through the centuries. This became the lifework of Gratian, another Bolognese scholar. His Decretum offered a comprehensive body of church rulings touching nearly every conceivable realm of human activity. Gratian opened the Decretum with words from the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesians: “For the whole law can be summed up in this one command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

The combination of Roman law and church law put Bologna at the center of a revolution: The Roman ideals of justice would be reframed and reinterpreted by the Christian concept of love. The fundamental understanding of law would be transformed. “No longer did it exist to uphold the differences in status that Roman jurists and Frankish kings alike had always taken for granted,” writes Tom Holland in Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. “Instead, its purpose was to provide equal justice to every individual, regardless of rank, or wealth, or lineage — for every individual was equally a child of God.”

The development of a medieval legal tradition, drawing on both civil and canon law, was exported. The greatest professors of the day carried the new outlook across Europe, to schools emerging in Paris, Prague, Vienna, Heidelberg, and Oxford. The foundation for centuries of Western legal thought — the basis for much of English common law and American jurisprudence — was being laid. And at its heart was the concept of equal justice, an innovation nearly as revolutionary as the Sermon on the Mount.

By the end of the twelfth century, the University of Bologna was renowned as the premier center for higher learning in Europe. Students from across the continent were drawn to its culture of truth-seeking. Graduates could teach anywhere, spreading their reputation as La Dotta, the Learned. The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I (1122–1190) granted special protection to Bologna’s foreign scholars, ensuring them “freedom of movement and travel for the purposes of study.” As a result, some of the most radical minds of the Middle Ages — including Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca, and Erasmus of Rotterdam — studied at Bologna. A noblewoman named Bettisia Gozzadini, after studying philosophy and law at Bologna in 1237, became the first woman in history to be awarded a university degree and allowed to teach at the university level. Even during the turbulent years of the Protestant Reformation, the university kept its doors open and protected Protestant students from prosecution by the Inquisition.

Today the University of Bologna, with eleven schools and more than 86,000 students, ranks among the top academic institutions in Europe. Its history is intimately bound up with the city of Bologna. In the historic squares, for example, it is not the statues of political or military heroes that dominate — but rather the tombs and memorials to medieval professors. Local churches, as well, pay homage to figures such as Scholastica, founder of the Benedictine nuns and the patron saint of education. It is largely forgotten that the popular term alma mater, used by university graduates around the world, comes from the University of Bologna: Its full name is Alma Mater Studiorum Universita di Bologna, or “the Nourishing Mother of Studies University of Bologna.”

The modern university could use some intellectual nourishment, Bolognese-style. Unlike the contempt for Western civilization that animates much of the academy, the students at Bologna paid homage to their cultural inheritance: the classical-Christian tradition. Unlike the tribalism and grievances that characterize campus culture, Bologna sought to create an academic community devoted to meeting the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual needs of its members.

The University of Bologna, in author Tom Holland’s words, became “a new nerve-center for the transfiguration of Christian society.” The recovery of its intellectual and spiritual vision is perhaps the most urgent task of our time.

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Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

National Review: Pliny’s Problem with Christianity — and Ours

This article was originally posted at National Review.

This essay series explores Italy’s unique contribution to the rich inheritance of Western civilization, offering a defense of the West’s political and cultural achievements.

Como, Italy — In the façade of the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, better known as the Como Cathedral, are statues depicting various saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Archangel Gabriel. Also displayed among them, though, is the figure of a Roman official famous for his role in establishing the empire’s policy of persecution against the Christian church.

Not long after being appointed governor over the province of Bithynia-Pontus, in modern-day Turkey, Pliny the Younger wrote to the Emperor Trajan about the growing problem of a new religious sect known as Christians. He put a series of questions to Trajan about their treatment. He professed to be “unaware what is usually punished or investigated, and to what extent.” The emperor’s response, a blend of brutality and pragmatism, helped to cement imperial policy for the next hundred years.

Pliny’s letter to Trajan, written around 110 A.D., reveals Rome’s attitude toward Christianity at a moment of great cultural and political vulnerability for the church. It also represents an analog of the condescension and hostility of the modern liberal state toward traditional religious belief: a pretense of toleration unable to conceal an appetite for repression.

The founder of Christianity, of course, had run afoul of Rome’s political establishment: Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, in part, for rejecting Caesar’s claims to absolute authority. His earliest followers did likewise, insisting that they would worship Jesus alone as God, proclaim his message of salvation, and bear witness to his resurrection — regardless of Roman law. Their stirring note of defiance is recorded in the New Testament book of Acts: “We must obey God, rather than men.” Confrontation with Rome was inevitable.

Although there were occasional bursts of intense persecution in the first several decades of the life of the church — such as under the Emperor Nero following the Great Fire in 64 A.D. — there was no systematic policy. Rome initially regarded the Christians as a sect of Judaism, which enjoyed limited toleration.

By the time Pliny became governor, however, the status of the Christians had changed. They were viewed as members of a breakaway sect — and they were on the move, winning converts throughout the empire. “For the matter seemed to me to warrant consulting you, especially because of the number involved,” wrote Pliny. “For many persons of every age, every rank, and also of both sexes are and will be endangered. For the contagion of this superstition has spread not only to the cities but also to the villages and farms.”

Pliny held the establishment view that Rome’s glorious history, her mission to civilize and dominate the world, was sanctified by the imperial religion. The ancestral gods, it was believed, had ordained Rome’s transformation from a small city-state in Italy to a world empire. As Pliny expressed it elsewhere in his correspondence, the emperor uniquely embodied the compact between the gods and the people of Rome. “We have celebrated with due piety the day on which the guardianship of the human race was passed to you in most blessed succession,” Pliny wrote. “We commended to the gods, from whom you derive your rule, both our public vows and our joys.”

State religion, rule by divine right, priests as agents of government — in all of this, Rome followed the pattern of the ancient world. The Christians uniquely threatened the established order of things, inviting the displeasure of the gods. Thus, to refuse to worship the approved deities amounted to an act of sedition. “As an apologist for the traditional religion,” writes historian P. G. Walsh, “Pliny reacted with dismay to the remarkable rise of Christianity in the province of Bithynia.”

Prior to writing the emperor, Pliny had adopted an ad hoc policy toward those brought before him and identified as Christians:

I asked them whether they were Christians. If they admitted it, I asked them a second and a third time, threatening them with execution. Those who remained obdurate I ordered to be executed, for I was in no doubt, whatever it was which they were confessing, that their obstinacy and their inflexible stubbornness should at any rate be punished.

Thus, the justification for putting Christians to death was not for any criminal activity but for refusing to submit fully to the authority of Rome in matters of religion. Although many historians underscore Rome’s policy of accommodating a variety of beliefs, there were no protections for the rights of individual conscience when it clashed with the state.

Pliny investigated for himself the activities of the Christians in his province, apparently because he took seriously his charge to govern. “But I chose you for your practical wisdom,” Trajan wrote to him, “so that you would . . . establish the norms which would be good for the enduring peacefulness of the province.” What he discovered must have challenged some of his assumptions. The Christians met at dawn on a fixed day of the week, sang a hymn to Christ as God, and bound themselves with an oath, “not for the commission of some crime,” but to avoid theft, adultery, greed, and other vices.

Perhaps this explains Pliny’s uncertainty about imperial policy. What exactly were the criminal offenses of the Christians, and how should they be punished? “I am more than a little in doubt . . . whether it is the name Christian, itself untainted with crimes, or the crimes which cling to the name which should be punished.”

In response, Trajan announced what some consider a measured, even tolerant policy. The Christians were not to be hunted down as if they were insurrectionists in waiting. “Christians are not to be sought out,” he wrote. If they were brought to the attention of the authorities, they could renounce their faith without penalty “by worshipping our gods.” In addition, Trajan definitively rejected accusations from anonymous sources: “Documents published anonymously must play no role, in any accusation, for they give the worst example, and are foreign to our age.” The emperor was keenly aware of how personal vendettas, through anonymous sources, could destroy a person’s reputation. (It is worth noting that, on this point, Rome took a more ethical position than do modern newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.)

Nevertheless, the brutal fact remains: Rome made the execution of “unrepentant” Christians — those who refused to renounce their faith in Christ — a legal norm. Trajan wrote that “no general rule can be laid down” to govern the treatment of Christians, but he then proceeded to do precisely that. “If brought before you and found guilty, they must be punished.” The emperor’s answer to Pliny’s original question is clear: To merely call oneself a Christian was enough to be sent to the lions.

It is sobering to remember that neither the emperor nor his hand-picked governor was considered brutal or inhumane by the standards of the day. Throughout antiquity, the principate of Trajan (98–117 A.D.) was regarded as a golden age, a return to the representative role of the Senate. Pliny’s letters are filled with practical concerns: A colony needs an aqueduct to “contribute to the health and pleasure of the city.” Another colony needs economic aid “to relive the poverty of those in greater need.”

Nevertheless, the social and psychological divide between Rome’s ruling elite and its ordinary citizens was immense. Pliny was one of the most prominent aristocrats of his generation. He owned several magnificent villas and threw elaborate dinner parties. As he explained to a friend, one of his villas in Bellagio, Italy, sat so close to Lake Como that “you can yourself fish, casting your line from your bedroom and virtually even from your bed, as though from a small boat.” Modern political dinner parties at Cape Cod, Mass., and the Hamptons on Long Island come to mind.

One of the lessons of Rome is that the life of extreme privilege weakens the capacity for empathy, which makes persecution of outsiders more plausible. We need not exaggerate the modern hostility to professed Christians and other religious believers in the United States who challenge established orthodoxies. Nevertheless, the deepening secularization of American public life is putting many religious believers at odds with some of its most powerful institutions. Today’s elites embrace the latest ideological fads — from critical race theory to gender-reassignment surgery — as though they were substitute faiths. Backed by the coercive power of government, they would search out, punish, and silence dissent.

The American Founders took a different view of the rights of conscience. For them, no political regime could invade the sacred realm of belief between the individual and her Creator. James Madison made religious freedom the linchpin of constitutional government: the moral and philosophical basis for the freedoms protected by the Bill of Rights. “It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him,” Madison wrote. This obligation, he explained, preceded the claims of civil government. “Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe.”

Madison knew his Bible. The Christians who confounded Pliny, who defied the political establishment, who faced death rather than bow to the idols of their age, embraced a profound imperative from their Teacher and Lord: “Render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and render to God what belongs to God.” Rome trampled this concept underfoot, accelerating its own corruption and disintegration — a lesson the Founders never forgot.

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Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

National Review: 1776: A Lockean Revolution

This article was originally posted at National Review.

Ten years before the American Revolution, Charles Pratt, the chief justice of Common Pleas in Great Britain, took to the floor of the House of Lords to argue that members of the British Parliament “have no right to tax the Americans.”

Although the government had repealed the Stamp Act in March 1766, it immediately proposed the Declaratory Act, which insisted that Parliament had “full power and authority” to pass laws binding on the colonies. Pratt, also known as Lord Camden, saw a backhanded attempt to violate the “fundamental laws” of nature and of the English constitution by continuing to deny Americans representation in Parliament. At the heart of his argument was the political thought of one of Britain’s most celebrated philosophers: John Locke.

“So true are the words of that consummate reasoner and politician Mr. Locke,” Camden said. “I before have alluded to his book. I have again consulted him; and finding what he writes so applicable to the subject in hand, and so much in favor of my sentiments, I beg your lordships’ leave to read a little of this book.”

The book in question was Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689), the political tract that demolished the case for absolute monarchy and helped to set colonial hearts on fire. Indeed, the American Revolution was a Lockean Revolution: The Americans declared, for the first time, that a nation was coming into existence based upon a belief in human equality, freedom, and universal rights. Upon this foundation alone could government by consent be sustained. Wrote Locke: “The supreme power cannot take from any man, any part of his property, without his own consent.”

Camden spoke for nearly an hour and, although there is no transcript of his speech, he apparently quoted extensively from Locke’s Second Treatise. It is a good bet he made use of Locke’s ability to employ a grammar of natural rights grounded in biblical revelation. Unlike Thomas Hobbes, for example, Locke’s “state of nature” was framed by a moral order whose origin was the Divine will.

The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges everyone, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions; for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker; all the servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the world by His order and about His business; they are His property…

Locke’s modern interpreters — from both the secular left and the religious right — often appear ignorant of his scriptural references. But American readers in the 18th century would have recognized lines from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, describing men and women as the handiwork of God: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.” Locke based his entire approach to politics on an anthropology — a view of human nature — that drew its authority from the Bible, a book that most colonial Americans revered.

The governing authorities, Locke reasoned, must respect God’s relationship with the people he has created: They are “His property,” having been sent into the world “by His order.” Political absolutism, he wrote, robs God of His divine prerogative.

Thus, after “a long train of abuses,” when political rulers make their “design visible” for all to see, they “put themselves into a state of war with the people.” Whenever that happens, Locke warned, “it is not to be wondered that they should then rouse themselves, and endeavor to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was first erected.”

The American revolutionaries found in this English theorist a political-theological ally. Governments preserve their legitimacy only by fulfilling the purpose for which they were instituted: the protection of our God-given rights and freedoms. To ignore these “self-evident” truths is to open the door to slavery and despotism — and revolution. As the Americans expressed it in their Declaration:

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security…

Why was Locke so influential in the American struggle for independence? No political author was cited more frequently. Ministers quoted him as enthusiastically as politicians: Samuel Cooper praised his “immortal writings”; Elisha Williams called him “the great Mr. Locke.” Even if Locke’s works were not explicitly mentioned, his rhetorical defense of human freedom, equality, and government by consent had permeated the thought of colonial America. In his groundbreaking book Locke: Two Treatises of Government (1960), Peter Laslett wrote that Locke established a set of principles for liberty and equality “more effective and persuasive than any before written in the English language.”

In his address to Parliament, Camden recognized Locke’s achievement with words that surely incensed his colleagues. In his “inestimable treatise,” he said, Locke had proved that “the people are justified in resistance to tyranny; whether it be tyranny assumed by a monarch, or power arbitrarily unjust, attempted by a legislature.” No wonder Camden’s speech was reprinted in numerous American newspapers and cited regularly in the pamphlet press.

The American Revolution is usually considered a radical event in political history, and it was. But it also exhibited a conservatism that is often neglected. In rebelling against their colonial masters, the Americans claimed their “chartered rights” as Englishmen and invoked a natural-rights tradition that Locke articulated with compelling power. “His principles are drawn from the heart of our constitution,” Camden explained, and formed the bedrock of England’s Glorious Revolution a century earlier. “I know not to what, under providence, the Revolution and its happy effects, are more owing, than to the principles of government laid down by Mr. Locke.”

Those principles — for which Locke became a fugitive and risked his life — included government by consent, the separation of powers, equal justice, and religious freedom. This English philosopher thus had a hand in two of the greatest political revolutions for human freedom in world history. That’s a legacy worth recalling this July 4.

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Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com

National Review: Anti-Semitism Is an Attack on American Principles

This article was originally posted at National Review.

The renowned British historian Paul Johnson has called anti-Semitism “a disease of the mind.” There seems to be no permanent cure for this disease. It has flared up again, not just in the usual international settings — in the United Nations General Assembly, for example — but much closer to home.

During the first week of the Israel–Hamas conflict, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) received 193 reports of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States. Two weeks ago, Jews were attacked by gangs in New York City and Los Angeles, and synagogues were vandalized in Skokie, Tucson, and Salt Lake City.

Attacks on Jews, however, began long before the most recent clash between Israel and the Islamist terrorist organization of Hamas. In 2019, the ADL recorded more than 2,100 anti-Semitic acts, the highest number in the 40-year history of the organization’s report. The murderous rampages in synagogues in California and Pittsburgh, a shooting at a kosher grocery store in Jersey City, the arson at the Portland Chabad Center for Jewish Life, the stabbing at the rabbi’s home during Chanukah in Monsey, N.Y., and brutal assaults on Hasidic men in Brooklyn — such incidents are no longer a rare occurrence.

Anti-Semitism is more than a hate crime. It represents a unique assault on America’s founding principles of equality and freedom. Despite the manifest violation of these principles from the start of the American experiment — the existence of slavery and the treatment of Native Americans — the United States created a civic culture that would regard Jews as equal citizens. Outside of Israel, America would become the most welcoming home to Jews of any nation in the world.

America’s journey toward religious pluralism stretches back to its early days. When the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam fell to the English in 1664 and became New York, Jews were granted all the rights of English citizenship “so long as they demean themselves peaceably and quietly.” New York governor Edmund Andros made a special effort to include Jews when he guaranteed equal treatment to all law-abiding persons “of what religion soever.” With regard to their civil rights, their Jewish identity was a nonissue; Jews voted in elections and held public office.

The Revolution of 1776 signaled to the world that a nation was coming into existence predicated upon the natural and inalienable rights of mankind — rights that could not be taken away because they were the endowment of a Creator, not the largesse of the state. The Constitution enshrined these rights in a political system of limited, republican government.

Religious freedom, considered the “first freedom” by the American Founders, was the linchpin. America has never had a national church: The government is prohibited from establishing or favoring any religion over another. The First Amendment guarantees religious liberty to people of all faiths, while the Constitution proclaims that “no religious Test shall ever be required” as a qualification for public office. State constitutions ultimately embraced these principles of religious freedom and equal justice.

The result, for Jews and all other minority faiths, was transformative. As nowhere else in the world, Jews were free to worship God according to the demands of their faith and conscience. They were also free to dissent from the religious views of the majority without fear of persecution. We call this American exceptionalism, an approach to political life — a fundamental respect for the spiritual commitments of all its citizens — that gives everyone a stake in the nation’s success.

The warm letters exchanged in 1790 between George Washington and a Jewish congregation in Newport, R.I., bear eloquent testimony to America as a safe harbor for religious pluralism. “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in the land continue to merit and enjoy the goodwill of the other inhabitants,” Washington wrote. “While everyone shall sit safely under his own vine and fig-tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.” The leadership of Jeshuat Israel did not withhold their gratitude: “We now . . . behold a Government which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance — but generously affording to All liberty of conscience, and immunities of citizenship — deeming everyone, of whatever nation, tongue, or language equal parts of the great governmental machine.”

Washington, always conscious of the example he set as the first president of the United States, knew exactly what he was doing. It is hard to think of another major political leader at the time, in any other government in the world, expressing such a hopeful and inclusive message to his nation’s Jewish inhabitants.

Not everyone in America, of course, shared this generous outlook toward the Jews; prejudice persisted, especially during new waves of immigration. Yet, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed during his 1830s tour, the United States established a civil society that was diverse, tolerant, and deeply religious — a combination that rarely appeared in Europe or other parts of the world. “Among us, I had seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom almost always move in contrary directions,” he wrote in Democracy in America. “Here I found them united intimately with on another: they reigned together on the same soil.”

Unlike in Europe, Jews in America never experienced systematic persecution. They had no reason to isolate themselves or create distinct legal systems. They were welcomed as equal citizens of a self-governing republic. “Since all religious groups had virtually equal rights, there was no point in any constituting itself into a separate community,” writes Paul Johnson in A History of the Jews. “All could participate in a common society.” “Thus, for the first time, Jews, without in any way renouncing their religion, began to achieve integration.”

Another reason for America’s warm embrace of the Jewish people must not be overlooked: the influence of the Bible. The earliest Puritan settlers established a “covenant” with one another modeled on the covenantal theology of the Hebrew Bible. Explains Gabriel Sivan in The Bible and Civilization: “No Christian community in history identified more with the People of the Book than did the early settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who believed their own lives to be a literal reenactment of the Biblical drama of the Hebrew nation.” Likewise, colonial ministers during the Revolution compared the battle for independence with the biblical story of Exodus: how the Jews escaped the slavery of an Egyptian tyrant and found freedom in the Promised Land. The inscription on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, of course, is taken from Leviticus 25:10: “Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”

Thanks to the impact of Protestantism, many Americans were intimately familiar with the Bible. Indeed, next to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the Bible became a third founding document for colonial Americans. According to the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of Great Britain, the “self-evident” truths of the Declaration — that “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” — were anything but self-evident. “They would have been unintelligible to Plato, to Aristotle, or to every hierarchical society the world has ever known,” he wrote. “They are self-evident only to people, to Jews and Christians, who have internalized the Hebrew Bible.”

American Christians of all denominations recognized in Judaism one of the great gifts to Western civilization: the concept of a moral law given to mankind by a divine Lawgiver. From their very beginnings as a nation — like no one else in the ancient world — the Jewish people sought to order their social, political, and religious life according to these norms. The Ten Commandments supplied the ethical bedrock not only for Judaism but also — quite remarkably — for Western civilization throughout the centuries.

The American Founders were acutely aware of this cultural inheritance and its importance to their new republic. They paid homage to it in countless ways, not least of which was in the physical architecture of their most important political institutions. It is almost impossible, for example, to ignore the carved image of Moses — deliverer of the Ten Commandments to the Jewish people — dominating the frieze atop the U.S. Supreme Court. As James Madison explained: “We have staked the whole of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government, upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.”

The unique contributions of the Jewish people to American political and cultural life may help explain the rise in anti-Semitism. Although white nationalism, draped in Christian symbolism, is a problem, the much greater threat comes from the secular Left. Political and cultural antagonism to Jews — in politics, entertainment, and mainstream media — is the product of a thoroughgoing materialism.

What does an increasingly secular and materialistic society have to do with anti-Semitism? If there is a single feature uniting the disparate elements of the Left, it is their rejection of moral truths, rooted in the divine will. The Jews, like no one else, delivered these truths to the world: an example of Jewish exceptionalism. Thus, the Jews stand in the way of the Left’s rage against transcendent truth, against the achievements of the West, against the claims of American exceptionalism.

If this is so, then the answer to anti-Semitism (a partial answer, to be sure) is the reassertion of America’s first principles: the recovery of our historic commitment to the God-given worth and dignity of every human soul.

This was precisely the response of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, when he encountered an outburst of anti-Semitism among his generals. General Ulysses S. Grant issued an order to banish Jews “as a class” from his war zone. At Holly Springs, Miss., a Union Army supply depot, Jews were rounded up and forced out of the city on foot. A Jewish delegation, led by Cesar Kaskel, arrived at the White House to contest the order.

Lincoln: And, so, the children of Israel were driven from the happy land of Canaan?

Kaskel: Yes, and that is why we have come unto Father Abraham’s bosom, seeking protection.

Lincoln: And this protection they shall have at once.

Lincoln immediately countermanded Grant’s order. (Grant would regret the order and overcome his prejudice.) This is what America’s great leaders do in the face of prejudice and injustice: They return to first principles, to the ideals of justice and equality embedded in the Declaration and the Constitution. If there is a remedy to the disease of anti-Semitism, it begins here.

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Joseph Loconte is the director of the Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. He is at work on a documentary film series based on the book, and the film trailer can be found at hobbitwardrobe.com